Again, it’s “Don’t quote the troll”. Some of us learned this in Usenet in the 1990s.

Saying “This is bullshit” or “You’re weird” without engaging with their ideas stops the contagion from spreading.

It is, though. Studies in disinformation have proven this. This is why right-wing bullshitters are so eager to engage in debate: just getting the chance to show up and be refuted in a legitmate setting, like a major newspaper, gives them an audience for the ideas and credibility, that their position is one worthy of refute.

This is how we got the alt-right in 2015: by taking neo-Nazis seriously.

This is what the media doesn’t understand, and why fact-checkers are getting–correctly–rolled on social media. Every time you bring up one of these lies, even to fact check it–especially to fact-check it–you give it credibility.

This is why the Harris/Walz campaign’s tactic of ridicule is working so well. Instead of saying “No, you’re wrong about XXX because YYYY and ZZZZ”, they’re saying “What is wrong with you? You’re weird.” The latter doesn’t give the lie any oxygen.

“Liberal” doesn’t mean what many people think it means.

It doesn’t mean “leftist” or “progressive” or “humane”. There might be some overlap, but these are not the same things, despite conservatives trying to define them as such.

Yes it is.

You might not wish it to be, but fact-checking absolutely does amplify fake news, especially if you give details.

A simple “this story is bullshit” is all that’s needed

And now you, the mainstream media, are amplifying it and giving it oxygen.

It’s like y’all never learned the old Usenet adage: “don’t feed (quote) the trolls”.

And this is why the rich are trying so hard to get right wing governments elected worldwide.

They know they’re running out of runway, and the next few years could be their last chance.

I’m not saying the usual crop of centrist ditherers are great, but they’re better than fascists bought and paid for by tax dodging tech bros.

Reichstag fire moment.

I won’t say I didn’t have a bit of schadenfreude when Fort McMurray burned.

I agree, but to some degree, people own their government, and this government is, more than many, responsible for much of the causes of climate change.

I’d say the same thing if Florida sinks into the sea, or South Texas and Louisiana are swamped, or north Alberta catches fire.

Apropos of nothing, Saudi Arabia is the definition of a petro-state.

Chickens. Coming home. Roosting. Etc.

Pirate an old, pre-CC version.

That’s what I do. Admittedly it’s Photoshop 3.0 on a Mac Quadra.

Grocery is a low-margin, high-volume business with huge startup costs and not a lot of supplier elasticity. Anyone coming into Canada should not expect to make money for years.

The last attempt was Target, and while they were the architects of their own fate in a lot of ways, even they weren’t planning to be profitable for years.

Aldi or Lidl could come in, but they’d be years lining up real estate leases, suppliers (both food and packaging/ops) all while trying to compete is already-saturated markets, against competitors that are vertically integrated (especially LCL/Loblaw) and already have much of the existing base locked up.

Assuming they even stay around, it’s likely they’d sell out as soon as their shareholders got twitchy about yearly losses.

If the government was serious about competition, trying to bribe a foreign company with billions of dollars would be a huge waste of money. A better option would be either nationalizing one of the existing chains or taxing their owners appropriately, so that they’d stop profiteering and put money back in the business.

One of the reasons billionaires even exist is because we spent the last forty years rejiggering our tax code to allow them to hoard wealth because Art Laffer and his hack disciples convinced Western policymakers that allowing the wealthy to hoard money would someone not result in the wealthy hoarding money, and that it would be a more productive use of capital to let the rich sit on huge piles of cash than to either a) tax it and spend it directly on public services, and/or b) threaten to tax it, forcing the rich to reinvest it or lose it.

No.

Taxing the billionaires that have profited off the status quo would, but under the rules of modern neoliberalism, market failures can only be fixed by more market economics.

Regulations? Public services? Nope, can’t do that. Only more markets. That’s the only solution we’re allowed to consider, no matter how many times it’s failed already.

Sigh.

Just in time for the Canadians to vote in a fascist bootlicker and the Americans to flirt with full fat Nazism.

What happened in Mexico that made leftism a viable option?

I mean, other than Exxon, Shell or BP.

And the Knesset.

And Putin.

But other than that!

Getting quasi-military far-right citizens to do your dirty work? Where have we see that before?

Just get them all matching brown shirts and be done with it.

This is rather like cattle protesting for faster processing times at the abbatoir.

Canada is basically strip-mining south Asian students for every cent of value as a way to avoid making hard political decisions about taxing the rich.

This is what happens when your platform prioritizes engagement over everything else, including people’s lives.

This article really ignores American trade policy hypocrisy.

Reagan was quite happy to slap tarrifs on stuff when it suited him. He practically gift-wrapped one for Harley Davidson, for example.

Reagan was an economic liberal when it suited his donors, and a protectionist when it suited his donors.

Rejectijg Clinton or Bush, maybe, not Reagan. Not at all.

Australians are basically US americans of the south (think food: originally british, cannot be healthy, no good car manufacturers, afraid of foreigners…)

They’re really more like Canadians than Americans, although I’ve heard it said that New Zealand more accurately fills that role